It’s my fault, really.

I was feeling bad for Pip, our tiny cat, because unlike Tigger and Bailey, we had no reason to reward her with regular treats.  Tigger gets treats because he is the only one who’s figured out how to use the cat door, and Bailey gets treats for letting us brush her, but Pip had nothing. I worried that she might be suffering from “middle child syndrome”, perhaps feeling left out and neglected. So when she started scratching on the scratching post I got really excited, because now I had a “reason” to justify giving her treats as well.

I’m sure you know what happened next. First, the fact that she was finally using the actual scratching post in no way stopped her from scratching the carpets, the furniture, the other cats, us, etc. Second, now that she’s figured out the Treat Rewarding Protocol, I swear that all she ever does anymore is  harass me-running across my feet every time I stand up, walking back and forth over my hands as I’m trying to type, rubbing her entire body across my face as I’m trying to read a book until I’m suffocating from breathing in 7 cats’ worth of hairballs-in hopes of wearing me down until I surrender and give her additional treats.

We pretty much spend every day locked in this same power struggle, a struggle which she usually wins because, HELLO!, I am just one woman, battered and bruised by the storms of chronic pain and fatigue, and she is one determined cat with NOTHING TO DO ALL DAY EXCEPT FOR THIS. I started ranting about this to my husband the other day in hopes of earning some sympathy for the trials and travails I courageously face each day, but he just didn’t seem to get it.

“I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal out of this,” said Mr. CFG. “So what if she gets two treats?”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” I said. “First of all, it’s the principle of the thing.” (Although I’m not really sure what principle I was referring to. The Principle Of, We Shouldn’t Get What We Want? The Principle Of, Crap-This Is My Own Damn Fault? The Principle Of, For Some Reason I Think I Must Find A Way To Bend You To My Will Which is Ridiculous, Because You Are A Cat And You Will Always Win? ) “Plus, if she knows I will always give her two treats, then she really will just spend all day forcing me to give her more treats. And soon, all I’ll be doing all day long is giving her treats. And then we’ll  have to start throwing entire bags of treats at her but she still won’t be satisfied,  and then we will go bankrupt from having to buy so many treats, and we’ll end up living in a box on the street, which she will probably then steal from us to see if she can exchange it for treats, and then we will have nothing.  IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?!”

(No, I don’t spend 10 hours a day alone with cats. Why do you ask?)

So, just to review:

–I decided that Pip needed some treats.

–I found a “reason” to give her some treats.

-She then did what cats do, and tried to get more treats.

-I got mad at her for acting like that cat that she is, which I imagine is akin to walking around enraged by the fact that, as a citizen of Planet Earth,  I cannot escape the laws of gravity.

Clearly, I *&#%&*EINGNSGITNGIMNJPD “Oh, God, no, NOT THAT!”&#*(%Y@&*(%JVU(WO#(sounds of shrieking) (*gurgle*)EVERYONE PLEASE REMAIN CALM AND STAY IN YOUR SEATS. JUST PASS THE TREATS AND NO ONE ELSE WILL GET HURT.

 

Today I am feeling very different-different from other people, I mean. Not that that’s an uncommon occurrence. But the contrast seems to be heightened on days like today, the beginning of something new, where the messages all around us seem to blare out, “Dream big! Think higher! Don’t settle!”

Well, I guess it’s not just New Year’s Day when we hear those things. It does seem as though every time we turn around there’s a commercial or a magazine article or a new pop culture guru telling us we need to change so we can Get Better, whatever that means. And personally speaking, if I hear one more person urging me to Live My Best Life or Discover My Passion, I will be hard pressed not to punch them in the face.

This stuff just feels so obnoxious to me because it seems like the people preaching it never stop to notice whether or not where we are right now is already passionate, and amazing, and huge-which it is. It’s like where we are just automatically gets discounted, and judged as “not good enough” without actually being noticed or acknowledged. I really hate that.

(It reminds me of the time right after I became certified as a life coach and went to a big conference about 6 or 7 years ago. The whole theme of the conference was, “Everyone in the world will have a coach by 2010. ” And my first thought was, “What if they don’t want a coach? You don’t know what’s best for everyone.”)

Because I have dreamed a very big dream-for me. It’s one I continue to choose each day, in that I have chosen to live my life as a Professional Free Spirit.

Between us, my husband and I have created an everyday life where we are both doing things that we really enjoy. He is pursuing a career path that is both satisfying and challenging, which allows me to be a stay-at-home wife and writer, and a tryer-outer of all the different experiences that catch my fancy. And because I am happy and satisfied, making our home, managing our household, and dreaming up goofy stories about That Time I Forgot My Underwear, that frees up time and energy for him which he can use to progress in his career.

But even though I’ve (we’ve) got this great life going on, it’s not all puppies and rainbows, which is another thing that the gurus never seem to mention. In the worldview that they propose, there doesn’t seem to be any room for what to do when life is hard. It’s one thing to deal with the normal fears that come up when you’re trying something new and stretching yourself to reach a goal that takes you out of your comfort zone. But in the books and programs I’ve purchased (and, I admit-I’ve purchased quite a few), there’s no chapter on “What To Do When You’ve Put Five Years Of Hard Work Into Your Tutoring Business And Written A First Draft Of A Book, But Then You’re Struck Down By A Debilitating Illness And Can No Longer Do Anything, Which Causes You To Lose Everything You’ve Worked For”.

So in this place, the place of living with chronic pain and illness, “dreaming big” looks very different. What we do here, day after day after day is HUGE, although not by the standards that “officially” signal success and accomplishment. If someone asks what you’ve been up to lately, or what you’ve done today, it kind of sucks when your answer is, “Well, I managed not to rip off all my clothes and run shrieking into the street, and then throw myself in front of a bus.” I mean, that’s not really something you can put in your annual Christmas letter.

In this place, “dreaming big” means choosing to look for the humor in this illness. “Discovering my passion” means dammit, I am going to figure out ways to keep writing even though I’m sick. “Living my best life” means showing up faithfully every single day and doing all the things I need to do to manage excruciating pain AND  paralyzing fatigue AND exhausting bi-polar mood cycling with grace and strength, and still finding space to create and live a good life.

It’s realizing that I’m not trying to get anywhere, that I don’t need to strive to reach a place that is different than where I am right now. It’s sinking down into my life, spreading out, and filling in all the delicious nooks and crannies, feeling into all the space around me and feasting on the juiciness that is right here, and finding that I am full to overflowing.

Right here is BIG. Right here is HIGH. Right here is HUGE. But most of all, right here is enough.

And may it be so for you, as well.

Amen.

For the past 3 months or so my life with fibromyalgia has turned into an endless marathon, a grueling exercise in endurance with no relief in sight. I feel like a rubber band that spends all day being pulled in opposite directions; I become tissue paper thin, but I never break. I fall into bed at night,  but one of  the vicious aspects of this illness is that nighttime and sleeping don’t actually provide recovery from the previous day, so every time I wake up I start my day from an ever deepening  place of depletion and weariness and pain. I blame this for the position I find myself in now.

It all started off so innocently, as these things do. I had just about finished watching all 8 seasons of NCIS on DVD, and I needed another form of entertainment to distract me from how awful I felt. But my brain was so trashed from having to spend all of its efforts on remembering to take my medicine, and engaging all my pain-management techniques, and doing the bare minimum necessary to keep the house and our family running, that I was having a lot of trouble with shows where I really had to pay attention to plot lines and characters. Plus, I had reached the point where I was completely fed up with my clothes and my lack of style, so on the advice of a number of friends I began to watch “What Not To Wear” on TLC.

I have never watched any “reality TV” before, but WNTW is really a feel-good kind of show. Stacy and Clinton genuinely want to help people, and the women are all so happy and confident by the end of their makeovers, and I’ve been able to learn tons and tons about fashion without ever having to leave the comfort of my own living room. But now I realize that, in addition to all of  these things, WNTW played a deeper and more powerful role for me than I realized: it became my gateway drug into the world of (allegedly) unscripted TV. I never even would have considered watching those kinds of shows before, but after a couple of months of watching-and, more importantly, enjoying-this type of entertainment, if I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of another reality show, I was much more likely to stop and watch it instead of immediately flipping to another channel.

But you all know what happened next; after a while, 2 shows just weren’t enough. I had to have more.

So then came “Breaking Amish”. I was really excited about this show, because I love stories about people’s spiritual journeys and religious traditions. But oooooh, how wrong I was about that.

(Yes, I know you’re all laughing here at my embarrassing naivete;. “Oh, bless your heart,” I can hear you saying ,” she actually thinks these shows are real.”)  But how was I supposed to know? This was all virgin territory for me, remember? How could I possibly know, with a different scandal breaking every five minutes or so,that this could possibly turn out to be the least “real” show in the entire history of “reality shows”?

I know now that the show is basically baloney, that it’s actually been a long time since any of the participants lived as Amish, and that pretty much nothing they’ve been saying is the truth. But you guys, I am hooked; I cannot look away. I am powerless to break my fascination with this train wreck. Jeremiah gets an enormous tattoo! Kate accuses Sabrina of practicing witchcraft! Rebecca had all of her teeth pulled out when she was 19 and now wears a full set of dentures! HOW CAN I NOT WATCH?

As you can imagine, by this time the dam had burst, and now I was watching any and every show I could find. And it just became easier and easier to “justify” my actions.

Long Island Medium: “Well, I’m all about the woo, so this is a perfect fit for me. Plus it feels really good to see how much she helps other people with her gift. And I really need to be around things that feel good right now.”

The Big Jig, which follows 5 girls from the United States as they go to compete in the World Championships of Irish Dancing: “Educational, informative, and does not require a lot of strenuous thinking on my part.”

Dance Down South, a show about rival clogging teams: “Well of course I had to watch this-one of the teams is from Cumming (GA), and once I was offered a job teaching Spanish at one of the high schools there, and some of those girls probably would have been my students, and so naturally I have to support these people from my imaginary life that almost happened.”

Faster and faster was I falling down this slippery slope. Because it wasn’t very long until I was watching things like this:

The Half-Ton Killer, where an 1,100 pound woman claimed to have killed her nephew by accidentally rolling over on top of him, and then had to have an entire outside wall of her house removed so that she could leave to attend her trial, but then was found to be lying  because he’d been killed by a blow to his head, and she was so heavy that she was unable to lift her arms by herself: “Um…I like murder mysteries?”

And, I confess-I even watched the end of an episode of Honey Boo Boo, the one where Alana wins the People’s Choice Award at one of her pageants and is rewarded with a visit by Glitzy the piglet, her erstwhile pet, which honestly was FREAKING HILARIOUS, and totally worth the shame and embarrassment I suffered when my husband found out.

But this morning as I was happily settling into the couch to check out Secret Princes (“This show is taking place in Atlanta, right under my very nose. I must watch so I can keep up with what’s going on in my city!”), I finally saw the writing on the wall, the sign that things needed to change as soon as possible. Because there, in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, TLC was advertising their new, captivating saga:

“My. Giant. Face. Tumor.”

Please consider this to be my cry for help.

“When you’re changing a diaper, this is the writing life. When you are steaming the foam for a customers latte, this is your writing life. When you are paying bills, driving carpool, setting the alarm clock to a cruelly early hour, this is your writing life. This may sound as unromantic as tying your shoes, but the fact is that writing is just another thing that we writers do.”

– Sage Cohen

and, not only are you right in a conversation with your husband, but, in describing how you are right you also get to utter the phrase,

“I blame the raccoon.”

So-

a Mormon, a Catholic, and a Baptist walk into a church. They were there to attend a Patriotic Concert, even though it was the week before Easter, and they were kind of expecting an Easter-kind-of concert. (Important Side Note: No one knew why this concert was Patriotic rather than Paschal, but if hadn’t been, then there  wouldn’t be this great story.)

When they were all seated they looked up at the front of the church and saw that it was decorated with lots of Americana, as you might expect. The One Whose Church It Was said that, technically, it was against the rules to have that stuff on the altar, but that The Upholding Of The Rules had lost that battle due to the sheer mass and force of nature that was The Choir and The Band.

“Well, yeah,” declared One Of The Others in solidarity, “you wouldn’t see any of that of stuff at my church, either.”

“That stuff? That stuff?”, asked The Third One incredulously. “What-you mean like, stars, and American flags?”

“Well,…yeah,” replied The Second One, quickly coming to the revelation that they were about to lose this battle.

“And that is why I was raised Baptist,” said The Third, “because we are allowed to decorate!”  (within reasonable guidelines, of course).

“Well,” said the One Whose Church It Was, “they tried. But in the end it was the whole choir versus just one guy.”

Just one guy?! Just one guy?!

Well, of course you know what that means.

That means that I got to introduce them all to the game of Just One Guy, as passed down by the inimitable Havi Brooks. As in,

My brother and I have this thing where we come up with ridiculous band names and then say in this really pretentious, knowing tone, “Oh, well, you know, it’s just one guy.”

At first I had a hard time explaining it, and then I was worried that even if I could, that I couldn’t explain exactly why it was so funny. It’s one of those goofy things that someone randomly says, but then starts to snowball and take on a life of its own.

Like, I think it’s Martha Beck who talks about a game that she and her brothers and sisters would play in church to entertain themselves, where you add the phrase, “in the bathtub” to the end of the titles of hymns. As in, “Standing On The Promises Of God-in the bathtub.”

But fortunately the humor translated, and The One Whose Church It Was Said, “Oh, ok. So, it would be like, ‘Anytown Community Choir: really just one guy.”

“Exactly!” I said, always happy to introduce More Funny wherever I can.

And then we settled back to watch the concert.

But before I go, I wanted to ask you-have you  heard the new music by “Belligerently Independent Baptist Design”?

I don’t know whether or not you know this-but it’s actually just one guy.

Do any of you play “Words With Friends”?

It’s my new entertainment, and I’m looking for, oh, 3-5 people who would be interested in a game.

If you are, email me at scrabble at jennyryan dot com and we can exchange our info.

Happy Saturday!

About 2 1/2 years ago I wrote a series of posts all about What Not To Say to someone who is living with chronic pain and illness.

**Edited To Add**

Here are the links to the previous parts of this series.

“Part One“.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Recently I was reminded of something else to add to the list, so I thought I’d write about it here before I forgot.

7. What you say:

Hey-let’s brainstorm some solutions for you. I’m sure there’s some tiny step you can take to start recovering.

Trying to ask us any kind of “coaching” questions to “help us move/shift the situation”.

What we hear:

You’ve settled/given up/resigned yourself to your condition

You’re not trying hard enough to get better

You’re doing a shitty, half-assed job of working on your recovery

****

We are so sick. We are in so much pain. Please go away and leave us alone.

We have most likely just come home from our 75^th doctors apt. of the week, where we just sat and listened while he listed yet another 10 things for us to try, with no guarantee that any will actually work for us. So we’re looking at another round of trial and error. Which we have no energy for, because it’s taking every ounce of our internal resources just to bear our pain/illness and get through today. But yet, we want and need to try some more things, because we DESPERATELY would like to find something that relieves our pain, at least a little bit, PLEASE GOD!

No matter what you’re going to suggest, trust us-WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT IT. WE’VE HEARD ABOUT IT ALREADY. AND AS A MATTER OF FACT, WE’RE PROBABLY TRYING IT RIGHT THIS SECOND. Trust us, WE HAVE NOT ACCIDENTALLY OVERLOOKED ANYTHING HERE; WE ARE MORE INVESTED IN FINDING SOLUTIONS AND RELIEF THAT YOU EVER COULD BE.

You don’t know anything about what we are or aren’t doing with our doctors. You don’t know the plan we’re already on. And it’s too exhausting to explain it to you. And we don’t have to. We don’t have to prove to you that we’re already trying “x” number of things, or “prove” to you that yes, we ARE doing everything we can to try and get better. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT OUR HEALING OR RECOVERY IS “SUPPOSED” TO LOOK LIKE, OR EVEN THAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE ANYTHING.

Healing looks like a lot of different things. Nobody knows yet what it is going to look like for us.

Just because it looks like there is nothing going on to you, doesn’t mean that nothing’s going on.

We are, or are about to be, or have just come out of, the depths of hell. And we know that it won’t be the last time. So to have a healthy person, who has absolutely NO CLUE what that is like come up to us and start chirping about, “hey, let’s brainstorm together,” or, “hey, I bet there’s at least one tiny step you could take here to start getting better”, or try and “coach” us in any way is just about the most evil, insensitive, painful thing we could hear right now.

Because it’s like you are just discounting everything that we’ve endured and everything that we’ve done, and everything that we are doing RIGHT NOW, as if it’s not real and doesn’t “count”. And infers that you, who have NO idea what we go through every single day, know more about dealing with our illness than we do. And that we are “doing” healing wrong, because we should be somewhere else than where we are, just to make you feel better.

I know that it is HARD, SO HARD, to watch us suffer. I know that you desperately want to offer us something that can help.

But, you have to respect our sovereignty here. You have to let us be in our own process. You have to let us be exactly where we are without trying to move us or get us to be somewhere else.

Because your wanting to give us advice, or coaching, or suggestions-that is about you; it’s not about us. It’s about trying to relieve your painful feelings that our situation brings up in you(which is completely natural and normal; nobody wants to suffer!) But you have to find a way to soothe yourselves that doesn’t depend on our doing or not doing something. It’s not our responsibility to make you feel better. Just as it is not your responsibility to make us feel better.

And please know that we know that, fundamentally, we are all doing the very best we can right now.

I’m hoping that my little, random, “You might also like these posts” will list links to the earlier posts in this series, but if it doesn’t then just search in the archives (which are in a drop-down menu on the right-hand sidebar) and pull up “August 2008”. The series starts with the post, “I Suck, Thanks For Asking“.